]]>Watch excerpts from our May 23, 2011 interview with retired Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, author of “Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.” His most recent book is “They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers” (Walker & Company). Produced by Patti Jette Hanley. Edited by Fred Yi.

Watch an excerpt from our May 23, 2011 interview with the man who served as force commander of the UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda in 1993-1994. Retired Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire says the West is failing in its responsibility to protect the innocent in Libya and now may face a war of attrition.

]]>As debate grows over US involvement in NATO’s intervention in the Libyan civil war, watch an excerpt about Libya from our May 23 interview with the force commander of the UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda in 1993-1994 and the author of “Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.” His most recent book is “They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers.”

]]>In accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1973, Operation Odyssey Dawn was launched on March 19, 2011. A combined military effort of American, British, French, Italian, and Canadian forces, this military operation has two purposes: protect civilians and civilian-populated areas (especially those under control of rebel groups) and create a no-fly zone by taking out all of Libya’s air defenses. The military effort is led by US commanders both in Washington and on ships in the Mediterranean.

In the UN resolution and in much of the debate leading up to the launch of the operation, the word “responsibility” has been in the air. The popularity of this term goes back to 2001, when a Canadian commission proposed the idea of a “responsibility to protect” as the framework through which debates about humanitarian intervention and human rights should be understood. In 2005, the UN General Assembly proposed the concept as part of its reform of the UN system in order to avoid politicking over matters that demanded immediate action. Since then, it has been invoked not only by academics, but also by policy makers and even military officials in support of various interventions in support of human rights.

“Responsibility” is not just a legal term, but a moral one as well. Indeed, some analogue of the term is central to philosophical and religious traditions around the world, including the just war tradition. The idea is linked to concepts such as duty and obligation, although there are some crucial differences, according to some philosophers.

What does it mean to say we have a responsibility to others? In one morally extreme version, responsibility means having to care for the ills of all people. Especially when one is powerful and can provide aid to many around the world, this notion of responsibility becomes more resonant. The just war theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain has referred to it as the “Spiderman Ethic”: for those with great power comes great responsibility.

One response to this might be to say that no matter how powerful, no one state or coalition of states can be responsible for all the problems in the world. The 2001 report on the “responsibility to protect” recognized this when it proposed an overlapping set of responsibilities, starting with the responsibility of the state to protect its own citizens, which then expands out to the larger international community when the state cannot or will not aid its own citizens.

But there is perhaps another way to think about responsibility, one that helps us better understand what is happening in Libya and that might be more relevant for the future. The Lithuanian Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas famously proposed an “ethic of responsibility.” Educated as a Talmudic scholar, but one who influenced French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Levinas argued that responsibility does not mean having a duty to solve the problems of the world. It is really about recognizing other peoples and communities as unique and worthy of respect in their own right. This recognition means challenging assumptions about oneself and one’s certainty about the rightness of one’s own cause.

Levinas was not proposing simple hand-wringing about one’s own sins or faults, nor was he recommending inaction. Rather, in the moment when one is called to act for the other, one must always recognize the danger of imposing the self on the other or assuming that one’s own ideas are the only ones.

So what does this have to do with Libya? As anyone with a passing interest in or knowledge of international affairs knows, relations between the countries leading the assault on Libya and the wider Arab world have been fraught with conflict and misunderstanding. These relationships have not been ones of recognition, from any perspective. Many in the Arab world believe North Americans and Europeans are simply interested in oil or supporting Israel, while those leading the intervention often demonstrate an embarrassing lack of knowledge about diverse political and religious Arab communities.

Rather than argue that the coalition forces should not act, the point here is that in acting, American, British, French, Canadian, and Italian forces need to be sensitive to their history of colonialism, occupation, and intervention in the region. While they may have a responsibility to protect the civilians in Libya, they also have a responsibility to recognize the reality of others who may not simply accept their aid with open arms.

Responsibility as recognition is not easy, but if there is to be any real ethics in international affairs, perhaps we need to look to new sources for understanding that responsibility.

Anthony F. Lang Jr. is senior lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. He has written most recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Afghanistan.

]]>BOB ABERNETHY, host: The situation in Libya remains uncertain. The Gaddafi government Friday (March 18) announced a ceasefire following UN authorization of outside military intervention. On Thursday (March 17), after a week of vigorous international debate, the Security Council approved establishment of a no-fly zone over Libya as well as “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.

What are the moral considerations that should guide a decision to intervene in another country? Kim Lawton took a closer look.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: As the situation continued to deteriorate inside Libya, calls for international military intervention escalated. The UN’s resolution demanded a ceasefire, and if the violence doesn’t end, authorized enforcement of a no-fly zone and pledged to take “any necessary means” to protect civilians. But there are never easy solutions.

SHAUN CASEY (Wesley Theological Seminary): Whether you act or whether you don’t act, the stakes are really quite high, and that’s what makes it so daunting from a moral perspective: trying to find the right way to know when to intervene and when not to because the consequences, the body counts are quite high.

LAWTON: In the wake of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the United Nations hammered out a set of principles known as the “Responsibility to Protect.” The principles say that nations must protect their population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. And if a state doesn’t live up to that responsibility, the international community has a responsibility to step in. The United States has endorsed those principles.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (from Nobel acceptance speech, December 209): I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in the other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.

LAWTON: According to Casey, the principles draw heavily from the just war tradition, which says there must be a just cause for such intervention.

CASEY: What people need to be looking for, particularly with respect to Libya, is to what extent are war crimes being committed, are innocent people being directly targeted, is there something approaching genocide occurring on the ground at this point?

LAWTON: Once that has been determined, the next questions are who has the authority for approving an intervention and who has the responsibility of carrying it out?

CASEY: Simply because you may have a justification for intervention, that doesn’t answer the “who” question. Should France be the one who intervenes? Should Saudi Arabia intervene? Should the Arab League? Should the Africa Union? There are a lot of regional entities there that may actually have some resources that could be applied militarily.

LAWTON: Atrocities in and of themselves don’t automatically trigger intervention.

CASEY: Sure, we have a commitment to fighting injustice, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to go militarily instantly wherever injustice occurs. We have to ask the question “how large,” and do we actually have the empirical, sort of pragmatic capability to do anything about it?

LAWTON: Casey admits it’s difficult to know where that moral line is.

CASEY: Nobody is going to say, “Well, you have to have 50,000 people die before we go in.” So you have to take it case by case, and certainly in a situation like Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands of people were butchered, in retrospect you’d say, oh my goodness, of course that was on a scale that would’ve justified intervention.

LAWTON: Another question is whether there is what the just war theory calls a “reasonable chance of success.”

CASEY: So let’s say we do a no fly zone and Gaddafi still sends in ground troops and tanks and manages to defeat the rebels. Does the fact that we established a no fly zone mean we want to actually then put ground troops to deter Gaddafi if he continues to be successful?

LAWTON: Casey says concerns about potential success have so far prevented the international community from intervening in Darfur, even though there is strong consensus that atrocities continue to be committed there. He acknowledges that not acting in a particular situation can also be a moral failure.

CASEY: If you have the ability to intervene and to stop an injustice or stop an atrocity and don’t, I think you do have moral culpability as a result of that.

LAWTON: The moral questions are getting increasingly complicated, and Casey says they’re not going away any time soon.

CASEY: If history’s any guide, we’re going to see more of these failed states and more of these sort of nascent civil wars, and we’re going to be asked a lot more to intervene in these kinds of conflicts.

LAWTON: All the more reason, he says, to stay vigilant in doing the moral calculus.

The death toll continues to rise in Burma, also known as Myanmar. As of this writing at least 32,000 people have died and that number is expected to rise significantly in the days ahead. Most of us have seen the photos, watched the video footage, and read reports of the cities and villages devastated by the cyclone — bloated corpses clogging the rivers, starving villagers huddled in monasteries, and the rising tide of water-borne disease. Meanwhile, the Burmese government is blocking or slowing aid flights and visas for hundreds of aid workers from around the world, insisting that all aid be delivered to and distributed by Burma’s military.

On Monday (May 12) the normally reserved United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon expressed “immense frustration” with Burma’s military dictatorship, the diplomatic equivalent of pounding his shoe on the table. Ban’s plea followed an earlier outburst by French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, who argued that the Burmese crisis was large enough in scope to force a U.N. resolution on the issue, based on the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. Responsibility to protect (R2P in shorthand) is a relatively new concept in foreign affairs, but one which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 2005 and which in essence recognizes that the international community — that is, U.N. member states — have a right to intervene through U.N.-sanctioned collective action when countries cannot or will not protect the human rights of their own people against serious violations of international law.

Survivors of Cyclone Nargis reach for used clothes from a local donor at a village destroyed by the cyclone, south of Yangon, May 12, 2008. (REUTERS/STR New)

Kouchner touched off a diplomatic firestorm. Even some proponents of R2P, including the U.N. Secretary General’s special advisor for R2P issues, Professor Ed Luck, argue that the doctrine would be misapplied if the international community were to intervene in the case of Burma — that R2P is to be specifically applied to crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing.

Luck is right, but in my view the deliberate blocking of aid that could avert the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Burmese people constitutes a crime against humanity. The world is not obliged to come to the aid of the Burmese people; that is precisely the job of their government. But if governments, aid groups, and individuals around the world reach out to the Burmese simply on the basis of our common humanity and the corollary desire to stop suffering where we can, then the Burmese junta’s determination to put itself between its people and that aid is nothing short of murderous.

Beyond the law, however, is the even more vital question of what practical steps can be taken to give the R2P doctrine effect — or simply to change the situation on the ground. Sending helicopters into Burmese airspace without permission is likely simply to add violence and bloodshed to the Burmese people’s woes, creating a war out of a natural disaster. Sanctions against Burma as a whole simply punish those who are suffering. Sanctions aimed at changing the lifestyles of individual junta members and their families could be more effective, but have presumably been tried. Other alternatives include inviting the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court to prosecute individual members of the junta for crimes against humanity, or working intensively with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to suspend or even expel Burma unless it accepts aid. ASEAN has just passed a charter of human rights; Burma makes it a mockery. ASEAN diplomats will argue that carrots work better than sticks, but then they must come up with the carrots that work — immediately.

Burma’s generals are forcing the world’s citizens to stand by and watch their people die. We have the legal doctrine to authorize action, but actually saving lives in Burma now requires both political will and practical tools.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the author of THE IDEA THAT IS AMERICA: KEEPING FAITH WITH OUR VALUES IN A DANGEROUS WORLD (Basic Books, 2007). She has written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Pope Benedict XVI’s UN address, and she spoke last year with R & E about faith, values, and foreign policy.